Iran designing its own version of the Internet | Hacker News Reader

Iran designing its own version of the Internet

washingtonpost.com

49 pointskevinburke47 comments

How much of this is them "isolating" themselves and how much is it simply in response to the fact that they're cut off from doing commerce with much of the U.S. (and other countries?) due to trade sanctions, etc?

serious question I would like to know the answer to

What will likely happen is that Government entities/businesses and other large business organizations will apply for licenses to access the Internet for commercial use. This is purely an information control/censoring move.

I think it's more the former than the latter. Restricting or controlling the flow of information is a standard tool for authoritarian regimes; it's easier to control your population when you can control how they perceive the world. The Iranians have additional incentives in their national security concerns, as they'd obviously like to avoid a repeat of the Flame attack.

Every morning I wake up to dozens of articles in my Google Reader from Fars News, Mehr and IRIB that assure me that Iran's international trade is doing just fine without the West. Surely state media wouldn't lie...

The Internet is Iran is already quite unique, thanks to the strict Government controlled filters in place.

There was a recent study testing the top 100 websites in each of Alexa's site categories. It tested if each was available in Iran using the Iran Firewall Test (http://viewdns.info/iranfirewall/).

The result? Approximately 27% of sites we tested were blocked. Categories such as adult sites saw much higher rates.

The research piece is here for anyone interested: http://viewdns.info/research/current-state-of-internet-censo...

> “When countries section off parts of the Web, not only do their citizens suffer, everyone does.”

No-one* in western democracies would ever consider doing such a thing.

*http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/aug/27/twitter-facebook...

This is obviously not going to solve the problem of cyber attacks. As I remember, even the stuxnet attack on their nuclear reactor was ultimately caused by transmission through a pen drive into an isolated network. No reason, the same cannot be achieved even if they isolate the country's network. More entry points as I see it.

They say it's meant to be a solution for cyber attacks, and to a tiny extent, it might be; but as everyone knows, the actual purpose is to cut off people from "information super-highway" completely (one step at a time).

As we all know, "Ignorance is Strength", and they'd like it better if we could only watch state TV and read stories from official news agencies. Would solve a lot of problems, or so do they think.

You are assuming that pen drives are still in use on their isolated networks. It matters such as these, it is very possible that the pen drive tactic works once, before measures are taken to prevent it again.

The internet is (obviously) one of the best examples of the network effect.

Sure you can technically wall of a subset of it and live on your own, but why would any sane person want to? I mean I get it, they want to limit access to non ideologically compatible ideas, which is most of everything.

But then that severely limits the utility of their new internet. Right now the economy is coasting pretty heavily on oil exports. If unlike say Qatar, they don't invest massively in more long term sustainable economic growth (which tends to require education, hence Qatar's massive education boom) then in a bit they are going to be pretty screwed. And cutting off this access to information is just so short sighted.

It's like blinding yourself because right now you can afford the servants to take care of all your needs. Long term, when you run out of money, you might wish you had eyes so you could earn some new money.

They will be able to harness a lot of the network effects of the Internet. Contrary to the linkbait title, they are not building "their own version" of the Internet; they are building a separate special purpose network of networks, much like SIPRNet. As long as they don't mess with any of the protocols they will be able to take advantage of advances in COTS hardware and software. Furthermore they seem to be taking advantage of China's surveillance machine. Instead of building their own version of the "panopticon router" they are buying China's.

Most importantly, your analogy misses the point about the Internet and the current power structure in Iran. If they do nothing to stem the free flow of information they will not be able to hold on to power long enough to run out of oil money. Comparing Qatar to Iran is apples to oranges. The political climate in Qatar is remarkably different than the political climate in Iran.

To a large extent your analysis is spot on. However you are assuming that the Iranian leadership is a semi-benevolent organization whose central goal is the betterment of the average Iranian's life. This is simply not the case in Iran. The Iranian leaders are more concerned with maintaining power and the destruction of Israel than they are with improving the lives of Iranians.

The West also censors. My understanding is Britain censored Press TV for spurious reasons using front organization Ofcom. French embassy refused visas for Iranian reporters. Germany also blocks Iranian news. Noam Chomsky, an old man who preaches the Golden Rule, was refused entry into Israel. Lily Sussman had Arab characters taped on her laptop keys and the Israeli border security shot holes through it. Fretting about another countries surveillance on its citizens seems a little silly today. Ahmadinejad was also elected, the electorate preferred potatoes over Western appeals to be able to wear bikinis.

I'm not saying that we don't have a fascist government willing to censor anything they don't like the look of but the Press TV thing might not be the best example.

They had their license revoked after broadcasting a "confession" by Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari that was conducted after torturing him and under threat of execution.

Then they apparently admitted to being editorially controlled by their Iranian branch, who are not licensed to broadcast in the UK.

http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/enforcement/broadcast-licen...

If they were any good at the international diplomacy soft power game they'd have just made sure only pro-Iranian people got hired to work at Press TV. Kind of like RT and Al Jazeera.

I've read nothing about there having been torture. Bahari claims the interview with Press TV was under duress. The journalist was held a total of 4 months. Bahari claims he had to condemn the west to gain release. The 10 second clip Ofcom uses to incriminate is: “On Monday, 15 June [2009], I sent a report about the attack against the base, a military base of Basij to Channel 4 News as well as to Newsweek Magazine.”

Nothing there is a condemnation of the West. http://www.presstv.ir/detail/181727.html According to Wikileaks the West has been trying to remove Press TV's broadcast.

He claims to have been beaten by his guards in numerous ways while in prison. http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/uk/maziar%2Bbahari%2Ba...

"Of course there was some physical torture. He beat me, hit me with a belt, punched and kicked me but to me the scarier parts were these conversations because I could see he had a very wrong view of the world.

Under "potatoes", do you mean something like the promise by Ahmadinejad to spend money earned by Iran to feed Iranian citisens?

If the answer is yes, don't you see a fatal flaw in such political programme?

It's called redistribution of wealth.

Hi, I am the author of the report and I wanted to clarify the technical detail that you get at. In fact there are two networks, a SIPRNet for the IRGC/MOI and the one that I cover. While I am still drafting my technical paper for arxiv, perhaps the abstract might clarify part of the argument.

"While foreign funding agencies have provided substantial support for the developers and vendors of services that facilitate the unfettered flow of information and opportunities for freedom of expression through the Internet, little consolidated knowledge exists on the basic communications network infrastructure of the Islamic Republic of Iran. In the absence open access and public data, rumors and fear have reigned supreme. During provisional research on the censorship regime of the government, we found initial indicators that telecommunications entities in Iran have leveraged private address spaces to build a mature information network only reachable within the country. Despite the clear political implications of the claim we put forward, particularly in light of rampant speculation regarding the mandate of Article 46 of the Fifth Five Year Development Plan to establish a ``national information network,'' we hestitate to engage in speculation regarding the purpose of this structure. Rather, in order to solicit critical feedback for future research, we outline our initial findings and attempt to demonstrate that the matter under contention is a nation-wide phenomenom that warrants broader attention."

So essentially, my argument is that the widescale routing of 10/8 subnets across domestic networks, coupled with domains pointed to these addresses, warrants serious attention.

Can I contact you off-HN? I will put my email in my profile...

Sure, and others are certainly welcome to ping me collin@averysmallbird.com or @CDA.

The modern Berlin wall.

I wonder how willing they'd be to host dissident content for first-world nations. I wonder how cooperative the Iranian cybercommand or equivalent would be with US DMCA takedowns.

World is trying to get connected in every possible manner and here are some, want to isolate and have their own world.

Such is the history of authoritarian regimes. If North Korea weren't so backwards, I imagine they'd be trying to do much the same thing.

North Korea has their own Country Intranet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwangmyong_(network)

Ha, I should've guessed. I knew Cuba had a network like that, wasn't aware of North Korea's.

The people of Iran will suffer the most, unfortunately.

I'm not a network engineer but is this all that difficult to do? I imagine if you control the AS (autonomous system) then you can control all routes into and out of the country, so they can easily block anything out of the country unless it comes from some known IP (like the computers of the elite class).

Obviously it wouldn't be an internet, only an iranet.

Is it just me, or wouldn't it be fairly trivial for a troublesome country to just point a satellite at Iran and give citizens access that way?

It is possible, however it is inconvenient and sometimes impossible for the majority to gain access this way. Also a large portion of the population uses internet cafes to access the internet, and they'd have to switch over the the national interanet.

It's pretty trivial to block a satellite.

Which is why they do, it's also very trivial to hunt down those privileged people with BGAN dishes deployed.

>> "a plan to take key government agencies and military outfits offline and onto the new network by the end of September. "

If I'm not mistaken, the US govt has "offline" internets, as well as stripped down and monitored internets. Not for all the citizens of course, but naturally for the key govt agencies, no? Doesn't really seem like news to me.

I support Iranian internet regime. Currently it's very clear that internet is run by Americans and because we need more open and controlled internet for the world, I would ask every Muslim country to support it too for it to become the next Internet for the world.

They could use DECnet for it, now there was a proper protocol. And LAT for the "last mile".

Something like 60% of Iranians are under 30. This is Iran's way of limiting any easy communication and organization amongst a younger generation seeking change.

Oh man, that headline made me laugh.

Don't underestimate Iran. They aren't quite the US or Japan, but ahead of any middle eastern non Israel nation, probably ahead of India in many ways, and on par with Brazil or Spain or maybe Italy in terms of domestic engineering talent and ability.

On the other hand, they are not geniuses to solve the problems of internet security once and for all. All they might manage to do is stop free flow of information into and out of the country. The "Iron curtain" never helped anyone.

To use Huawei's equipment to achieve their national security needs is just naive. You might as well handover your country's internet infrastructure to China itself.

[EDIT: Added some links regarding Huawei (Whether the allegations are true or not, they are controversial and risky to trust):

http://www.truthalliance.net/Archive/News/tabid/67/ID/9347/C...

http://www.telecomstechnews.com/news/2012/sep/14/are-foreign...

]

DoD runs multiple separate versions of the Internet (I'd call them Internets vs. just a big intranet due to size and scope); NIPRnet for unclassified and SIPRnet for Secret are the two big ones. It's totally reasonable for Iran to do something at that level.

Huawei probably won't help the USG vs. Iran, so using Huawei for this is a better choice than using Cisco, actually.

I fear I was misunderstood. What made me laugh was the thought that the internet is a sort of wild west of ideologies and Iran, from what little I know, is a very tightly controlled ideological context. I did not even read the article. It's just the title that struck me as paradoxical. "Internet" == uncontrollable, Iran == tight control, "Internet" + Iran == WTF? Hope that makes sense.

I realise internet here probably just means a research network. I have tremendous respect for the Iranian people and certainly their computer professionals. From what little I've seen they are very bright. As for comparisons in terms of engineering talent I was thinking almost on par with Russia. If I'm way off the mark it just shows how little I know. Pay no mind.

I know a fair bit about this.

It's only there to restrict people's access to uncensored information. Cyberattack etc is just an excuse to make people think it's something for their own good.

Since they can tightly control it and it is a national network, they will offer very fast speeds with attractive prices, the actual internet is terribly expensive and incredibly slow, then they'll slowly expand from there, similar to china, they will make their own versions of Twitter and Facebook and Gmail and offer those at very cheap prices with great speed.

Banks and all government organisations are soon going to require people to use a 'national email'. If your emails is @gmail.com they'll simply refuse it and will ask you to open an account on this new email site.

Once it gains some momentum it'll snowball from there. Those who only want to send an email and send a couple of messages to their friends will prefer the national network because it is much cheaper and a lot faster.

Having said that, the whole thing is destined to fail. People will find ways to fight it. At this point there's not enough information about the network architecture but most probably there will be a large pool of computers with high speed and unrestricted access to the internet as part of this network.

They will be the gateways to the internet. For example an Iranian bank will transfer its 'netbank' to the national network. But the server that is hosting this netbank still needs the internet to operate so that server will be connected to the internet with a high quality link.

There's a possibility that people will manage to gain access to these nodes and use it as a proxy to get high speed internet. Obviously if someone manages to do that they'll probably try to stick to it as long as they can so it wont bring the internet to everybody.

The network is being laid out from next week all across the country. We'll see.

> Banks and all government organisations are soon going to require people to use a 'national email'. If your emails is @gmail.com they'll simply refuse it and will ask you to open an account on this new email site.

True, that was a policy statement from Taghipour, however my impression is that the resistance from the banking industry and Majles led to the mandate being scrapped. However, the overall point that Iran has a civil society around the Internet is valid and the reason I am pushing out the paper quickly.

Here is a link on banking: http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&...

Exactly. Using science and technology to restrict access to more science and technology is not only pathetic, but also funny.

Whew. I was afraid no one else saw the humor in that headline.

So Iran is making their own "AOL"? perhaps they'll call it "IOL". Hopefully, they'll mail CDs to their citizens with FREE 1000 hours of internet time.

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